


Valediction

by lasergirl



Category: V for Vendetta (Comic)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-03
Updated: 2010-04-03
Packaged: 2017-10-08 16:04:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/77377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lasergirl/pseuds/lasergirl





	Valediction

**Author's Note:**

  * For [marshalmeg](https://archiveofourown.org/users/marshalmeg/gifts).



## Valediction

I.

It was the sixth of November when they took me from the nightclub where I worked. November sixth, and I still had eyeliner and powder in the creases of my face from the cabaret the evening before. I laughed when they asked to see my work permit. No legitimate performer would be caught working at a dive like the Parliament House in the first place.

I intended not to give them a cause to hold me, though in retrospect I should have known better, because the Finger doesn't abduct people unless they've already come up with a cause. In my case, I think that merely existing was cause enough for them. If they had seen the performance on Guy Fawke's Day, they might have shown up a little sooner.

I was optimistic, once. There was hardly reason for it, of course. I know as well as anyone what began to happen once Norsefire gained ground in England. The Party changed the face of the nation by erasing all the blacks, the Jews, the Asians and Indians. Whitewashing was only the beginning: when they ran out of foreign faces they came for the homosexuals, the lesbians, the transvestites. They locked up the free-thinkers and political activists. They would have locked up the vegetarians if there hadn't been so many of them after the meat shortages. Strangely enough they left the prostitutes, and the child molestors and rapists. Some deviants, it seemed, had a place in this new world order.

But I digress.

I was detained nearly six months at Rockwood, a noble, hulking asylum of limestone and greened copper, situated on the shores of a lake. It is a reflection of the inestimably positive attitude of tyrants and medical sadists that such facilities are given pleasantly euphemistic names. It used to be the same with homes for the aged, though the present so-called government has done away with them. Let the old and infirm die the way God intended: in bare, frigid rooms and dirty backalleys.

There had been trees once, and grass, but the war had faded everything to shades of brown and grey. The grounds around the main building had been fortified, fenced off with electrified lines and razor wire. There was a greenhouse and a workshop where inmates of the former institution had busied themselves while waiting to be found sane or cured. In the workshop, there were tools for carving wood. In the greenhouse, there were dying roses.

At Rockwood and army of psychiatrists showed me photographs of pretty women and fed me chemicals and asked me what I thought of them. I answered their questions with as few words as possible and stared past their cheap pornography to the bleached grass and the glass building like a crystal palace. Walking the grounds was forbidden at night, but security was so lax that I spent many nights away from the screams and cries of my fellow detainees in the solitude of the greenhouse. My only observer was the moon, painting everything in silver and black shadow.

Over those six months, nearly all of the rose bushes died. All of them except one.

II.

The exact day I was sent to Sweetwater is preservec in the memory banks of Fate. On the twentieth of December, early morning, I was chained to a metal bench in the back of a windowless transport and driven for hours, jostling in agonized silence with six other men. We emerged, sick and shaking, into the barren concrete yards of the Sweetwater Holding Facility, where we were to remain for over a year.

The psychiatrists were clever people, or at least they thought so. They didn't resort to cheap printed photographs of airbrushed bodies. They had a battery of ink-stained paper cards which they insisted were unbiased. Any images we saw, they told us, were the products of our own diseased minds and not the ink itself.

"Tell me what you see."

"It's two people."

"Can you be more specific?"

"It's two men."

"What else?"

"They're holding hands."

"Are you sure that it's hands they're holding?"

Well, of course they weren't. But at Sweetwater no one ever said what was on their mind. The doctors went on, day by day, with their profiling and psychiatric tests, and every month, new inmates would arrive, sniffing the air like nervous dogs. We grew accustomed to the daily tests, the physical examinations, the thin hospital gowns that left little protection from the cold and even less privacy.

Those with weaker convictions were sent away to be reconditioned and those like me - those with hearts and minds and courage enough for individuality, well... those like me were drugged, interrogated and scared out of our wits. We were gagged and bound in straightjackets, forced four to a cell at nights, where we curled like beasts together to keep warm. And that, too, was an undesired response: the men of Norsefire's England did not seek comfort in the bodies of other men.

The ones that fought back violently were taken away, never to be seen again. The ones who suffered in silence remained. And when they had winnowed down the inmates at Sweetwater, there was only one place left for us. We were obviously unfit for society, but we had done little of importance for them to justify killing us. Again, we were locked into transports that smelled of urine and terror, drugged to make us docile, starved to keep us weak. After everything that had been done to us, we finally went West.

West, to Larkhill.

III.

I remember the day when the new female doctor arrived at the camp because it was mild for December and the Commander had turned us outdoors in a vain attempt to make his dying band of political prisoners and perverts look a little lively. I suppose he was trying to impress her. Doctor Surridge kept her distance. She found him distasteful, as did everyone at Larkhill. She wasn't a camp doctor, she was a research scientist. She seemed shocked at first by the treatment of inmates and on more than one occasion attempted to interfere with Prothero's plans for the work details. He was a vain, arrogant tyrant. Just the sort, in fact, that Norsefire wanted in charge of a death camp. He could watch a starving child suck on a stone to quiet his hunger pains and simply laugh.

Prothero interviewed us with cattle prods and handcuffs and cold water until we answered his questions. What we answered was never the truth, only what he wanted to hear. We were not human in his eyes.

Nor was he human in ours: Prothero was allied with the priest that Norsefire had sent to keep a humanitarian eye on the camp, Father Lilliman. Between the two of them, atrocities were committed and perpetuated that would have had even the Leader tossing sleepless in his bed at night.

Lilliman came to us on Sundays, with his tiny scraps of stale wafer and the bitter vinegar that passed as sacramental wine. He would ask us if we had given up our sinful ways and embraced his faith. He wanted us to beg for his God's forgiveness.

There was nothing the Blacks and Asians could do. It didn't matter how much they prayed, their skin would never go white. He must have been glad that most of them died so quickly.

Lilliman told us that God wanted us to repent. One of the lesbians, Rita, tried to believe him but the only thing she got was pneumonia, and when she died she went to the same place they all did: the lime pits.

He came to the medical block and sat outside my cell door, reading me passages from his Bible. Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. Romans 1:26. Corinthians 6:9. But I could tell, before he tried to save my soul, he was saving the souls of the daughters of incarcerated political activists. They were too-young, too-white girls untouched by starvation and labor until they arrived at Larkhill. He promised them real bread and butter and took them to his rooms. For decency's sake I should say that I had only an inkling of what went on there, but at night the camp was quiet, and the cries of young girls sound nothing like the broken sighs of dying men.

IV.

It's hard to say what I knew about Valerie at all before I left Larkhill. I knew she was dead, but I didn't know what she looked like before she died. That wasn't even so important, because Batch Five had changed us all so much. She was one of the unapologetic ones like me. She refused to back down just because someone else thought what she was doing was wrong.

Room V was cold all year round, with bare cement floors and walls, a hard board with no mattress and no blanket. In a crack in the wall under the bed was a rat, which watched everything that happened with cruel black eyes, waiting for the opportune moment. At night, when I laid down but did not sleep, it sniffed around my feet and hands. It didn't like what it smelled, and did not bite.

After Doctor Surridge's injections, my reflexes became inhumanly quick and my tolerance for pain increased. Commander Prothero's interviews ceased to intimidate me, which made him even more furious. After I caught the rat (I had never killed anything before in my life and was surprised at how easy it was) there was a crack in the wall of my cell that was uninhabited, and that was where the letter came through. A crack, too small for a man's hands, too small for fingers and wrists to enter, but the right size for a rat... and for the shortest life story ever written.

Her name was Valerie. For a time she was in the cell next to mine, but in the weeks leading up to the killing of the rat, the cries and living noises from the other occupants in my corridor had stilled. I counted the number of times the guards had dragged bodies from the cells and there were four and I knew I was alone. I was only waiting to die, waiting to draw that last, shuddering breath and feel everything stop. My body would cool and my blood would congeal and Doctor Surridge would slice me open to interrogate me in ways that Prothero never dared.

I tried to remember what she looked like, if I had known her before the guards took our hair and Batch Five took our humanity. The more I tried to remember, the more it slipped away from me. I was no longer an individual. I was everyone who had arrived at Larkhill, and everyone who had died there. We had been herded together like starving animals, packed close to keep our sickly bodies upright so we were not trampled into the mud. We were all hairless, half-naked, black-eyed and desperate, and in that, we were all brothers and sisters. We were all shades of the same skin-colour, a rainbow of suffering.

But there was no-one left for me to tell my story to and every day it grew fainter and fainter. Every time I read that tiny, tortured paper scroll, Valerie's life would flash alive for me. Her loves, her work, her roses bloomed for me each time. She died because she would not give up that last inch of herself.

"I shall die here, every inch of me shall persish... except one," she said.

V.

A curious thing happened when Doctor Surridge injected me with Batch Five. I don't think I flinched; I had taken many hundreds of needles before hers. But she looked at me, for once, as something alive and separate, as real person compared to the dreadful paper cutouts we resembled. She wasn't interested in me until I met her gaze. And then she became obsessed with me.

It was not Stockholm Syndrome, where the victim empathizes with his captor. This was something new and more dangerous: a scientist so fasinated in an organism that she forgets she is supposed to be in control of the experiment and instead lets her subject lead her.

Oh, and lead her I did. She brought me the rosebush from Rockwood when I said it might help me remember who I was. She gave me access to tools and to certain chemicals without questioning. Perhaps she should have. What conceivable use would I have for chlorine pellets without a swimming pool? I told her I needed the sodium alginate to suspend nitrogen fertilizer for the vegetable crops. When she let me have an electric light I dismantled it for parts.

Hydrogen and oxygen separate from water with the application of an electric current. If you haven't enough explosives, this will do in a pinch.

And Dr. Surridge was focusing so hard on the details, the methods of my madness and the symptoms of her drugs that she couldn't see the bigger picture. And in the eyes of the camp guards and the Commander, I was just another degenerate, finally driven insane by their hospitality.

You can make napalm out of gasoline and styrofoam. Or concentrated orange juice. Or cat litter. Chlorine gas can be produced from common household bleach with the application of ammonia. Chlorine pellets, sugar and water will cause a chemical reaction and explode in a sealed container.

You can slice your knuckles to the bone on rough-edged concrete, retrieving the life story of a woman already dead. You can live as a prisoner and die a free man, as long as you keep that one last inch of yourself they can never take away.

Just one.

**END.**


End file.
